Lagos Episode 16
= Episode Summary = Before the run: The famine continues to build in Lagos, along with other bad news: the Igbo-Yoruba war and famine refugees pouring into the city adding to ethnic tensions and hunger. Riots in various markets, several (unsuccessful) raids on corporate food storage facilities, very little global awareness of the building problems. The Yoruba King Adegoke has released several threatening statements towards unaffiliated tribes, threatening attacks if they do not join the Yoruba. The run: Ekwueme arranges for us to meet a new Johnson who works for Wuxing. The job would involve an immediate departure, so the team gathers their supplies to meet at the Three Friends. Wuxing does not have much of a presence in Lagos, but they are trying to start a new manufacturing plant there, in the Badagry slums. They've taken over a property there, once owned by Aztechnology, by simply evicting the squatters. Lagos makes sense as a port, since it has easier access to the UCAS market and cheap labor. Captain Jack arrives first and talks with Hippo about business opportunities. He also spots Cintre Ime, who leads the Ahigbe gang and forced her way onto the Lagos council by assassinating anyone who disagreed. The rest of the team arrives. Mr. Johnson arrives, with 2 bodyguard orks. He has a deep raspy voice, is well-dressed and has dark rings around his eyes. Mr. Johnson informs the team that he has lost a Wuxing team underground and wants to hire us to recover them. He offers 7000 nuyen, causing Valkriss to leave in disgust. But Captain Jack, seeing his desperation, negotiates for 15000 and Mr. Johnson agrees. Valkriss rejoins the group. Mr. Johnson informs the team that Wuxing has acquired a property near Surulere with some underground tunnels and that he sent a team of seven experienced Wuxing employees to investigate it, but they've gone missing and he wants to know what happened. When questioned about the possibility of shedim possession, Mr. Johnson admits he hasn't heard of them, but that there are two key team members that they really would hate to see lost: the physician (a mage) and the team leader. Valkriss, performing a matrix search on the site, learns that the property was owned by Aztechnology 10 years ago, but there was a riot during a food shortage and the factories burned down. Squatters have since moved in until recently. Valkriss finds fishing line among the junk in her workshop. Captain Jack acquires a Lucifer lamp and we gather scuba gear and respirators. We lower ourselves and some supplies into the tunnels below the facility and begin to explore. One room contains a very large crocodile, which scares off the team. But it appears that the team before us didn't go that way. While exploring, we find time-stamped RFID tags, telling us when the team arrived at various locations. We find a strange room, with walls covered in Aztec pictographs. In it are piles of ashes, candle stubs, small bones, herbs, and, in one corner, 30 shell casings, but no RFID tags. Dr. Pie believes this is the site of a magical ritual, and can make out a little of what the pictographs are conveying, some odd things about the location. He thinks the bones are mainly small animal bones (rats, cats, dogs) with a few human bones from hands and feet mixed into the pile. There is no sign of blood. Valkriss thinks the shell casings were fired in the last 2 days, and that they match the weapons carried by the other team (it had 2 weapon specialists). Oddly, she finds only 5-6 bullets in the walls, so there are about 25 bullets missing. The teams finds a room with a waterfall going into a pit so deep that we can't see the bottom. There is another RFID tag there. Dr. Pie summons a water spirit and orders it to hold back the water for us. The team heads down the pit. At the bottom, we find odd egg-shaped fungus and moss. The fungus, when prodded, released a whitish viscous ooze. Valkriss takes a small sample. The team explores the lower level, finding more RFID tags, and a branching set of tunnels. Using the Fly Spy as a scout, we find a human and a snake. Dr. Pie astrally assenses them and learns that the snake is a young naga. It spots him and attacks. The human has poisons in his system and is being harmed by the snake. Captain Jack stuns the snake and it releases its captive who, it turns out, is the paleontologist from the other team. Valkriss uses and antivenin and a medkit, but he needs more care that the team can provide, so we carry him back through the tunnels and back to the surface, to place in the medical drone. Dr. Pie opts to stay at the bottom of the pit, and encounters 3 ghouls, but they don't notice him. The team finds a large dark cavern, with and opening at the far end. Bats (not flying tribbles!) stream out of the cavern. Captain Jack uses his grapple gun to cross and Valkriss uses that to support a flimsy rope bridge. The team crosses it, and finds another RFID tag. There is an old metal security door, with an Aztechnology logo on it and an old mag lock which Captain Jack hacks. Beyond it, there is a small chamber with another door at the far end. On the walls, there are black scorch marks. Valkriss thinks they were caused by some sort of chemical, maybe a flammable liquid. The team suspects a fire trap of some sort. Captain Raptor e-senses and notes only mag locks on the doors on either end of the room. Dr. Pie astrally perceives, but encounters a ward at the next door. He orders his water spirit to manifest and walk across the room, and it triggers a mechanical pit trap which drops onto spikes. There is a 1 m walkway around the edge of the room. Within the pit trap, there is a mangled corpse, one of the weapon specialists. We rig up a grenade to go off if we must leave at speed. Captain Raptor opens the door at the far end. On the other side of that chamber, there is another door with just a handle. Beside it, there is a large round red button and a letter-sized plate. Dr. Pie, assensing the room, notes a faint aura in the center of the room. His fire spirit reports that there are two anchored spells, a detection spell and a combat spell. We think it is a trap, triggered by some condition. The door we just opened is designed to spring shut and lock, so Valkriss hammers a climbing spike into the floor, to keep it open. Dr. Pie orders his water spirit to set off the trap. The water spirit tries everything, stepping on every part of the floor, pounding on the red button and on the door. Then it pulls out the spike at the door, which slams shut. We hear some mechanical noises at the mag lock re-engages and adds a pneumatic lock. About 30 seconds later, the spirit is disrupted. captain Jack readies a mini welder to open the door but before he can do much with it, the pneumatic lock disengages. Dr. Pie assenses the ceiling again, and notes that the anchored spells are still in place, and now the mage setting the spells knows we are coming. We prop open the door with another climbing spike. Dr. Pie and Valkriss wait outside while Captain Jack tries to cut through the door, triggering the trap. But he manages to run from the room before he is closed in (the spike is bent by the force of the gears on the door). Eventually the pneumatic lock disengages again, and Valkriss sets explosives to destroy the door. It works with a loud boom. We see a pair of hellhounds and a spirit of beasts approach to attack us. Dr. Pie starts his long descent into drug addiction by taking a dose of Jazz. The team drives off or kills the attackers, and we pass the next door, into living quarters. We find three more chambers built into the tunnel, everything disgustingly dirty and smelling of rotting meat. Dr. Pie finds some research papers, apparently written on human skin. The research is written in some sort of code. We find a final unopened door with a regular lock. Valkriss uses her autopicker on it. Inside, we find a bound human, badly wounded with a robed man bending over him. The robed man draws a knife across his prisoner's throat. We also find two corrupted spirits, one of beast and the other of man, somehow also the remains of two of the people we were seeking (an elven weapon specialist and the physician). Dr. Pie believes the robed man has been turning the other team into blood spirits. Captain Jack kills the blood mage and shoots one of the spirits. Valkriss activates her amulet, asking the spirit who appears (a young woman, the victim of domestic abuse) for help. She enfolds the slain prisoner and heals him. Dr. Pie banishes the spirit of man, and it vanishes. The final spirit flees, which may cause trouble for us later. combat ends. Within this room, we find a corrupted library, with books made of human skin, written in a phonetic translation of the Aztlan language. The blood mage has been at this a long time. Dr. Pie's mentor spirit, frighteningly, would want him to take the books and learn from them, but he struggles against the desire and we burn them. We also find the dismembered heads of the rest of the research team and believe there are three more blood spirits out there. We escape and tell Mr. Johnson what we learned. We are paid and Valkriss gains a friend for life of the man she saved, a Wuxing project leader named Shen Feng-xiang. = Quotes = * GM: "But what if there WERE Flying Tribbles." Players: "That's totally not canon." = People met = * Mr. Johnson - Our Johnson, working for Wuxing * Shen Feng-xiang - Wuxing's project leader, saved from death = Places visited = * The Three Friends Restaurant * Wuxing factory in Badagry slums = Rewards = * 5 Karma each (+1 MVP for Dr. Pie) * 15000 nuyen